Altieri, Charles, The Art of Twentieth Century American Poetry: Modernism and After (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
Altieri, Charles, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Beach, Christopher, The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press: 2003).
Bellamy, Joe David, ed., American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984).
Bercovich, Sacvan, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature Volume 1: 1590–1820 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Bercovich, Sacvan, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature Volume 4: Nineteenth-Century Poetry 1800–1910 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Bercovich, Sacvan, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature Volume 5: Poetry and Criticism, 1900–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Bercovich, Sacvan, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature Volume 8: Poetry and Criticism, 1940–1995 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Blackmur, R. P., Form and Value in Modern Poetry (New York: Doubleday, 1957).
Carr, Helen, Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H. D. and the Imagists (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009).
Fredman, Steven, A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005).
Gelpi, Albert, A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Gelpi, Albert, The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Haralson, Eric L., Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 1998). Compiled as a companion to a landmark, two-volume anthology, American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, John Hollander, ed. (New York: Library of America, 1993).
Hass, Robert, Hollander, John, Kizer, Carolyn, Mackey, Nathaniel, and Perloff, Marjorie, eds., American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume 1: Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker (New York: Library of America, 2000). Volume one of the most comprehensive anthology of twentieth-century American poetry now in print, with biographical notes on the poets printed therein. See also the two-volume anthology of nineteenth-century American poetry, edited by John Hollander, and the one-volume anthology of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American poetry edited by David Shields.
Hass, Robert, Hollander, John, Kizer, Carolyn, Mackey, Nathaniel, and Perloff, Marjorie, eds., American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume 2: E. E. Cummings to May Swenson (New York: Library of America, 2000).
Hollander, John, ed., American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume 1: Philip Freneau to Walt Whitman (New York: Library of America, 1993). Volume one of the most comprehensive anthology of nineteenth-century American poetry now in print, with a detailed chronology and biographical notes on the poets printed therein. See also the two-volume anthology of twentieth-century American poetry, edited by Robert Hass et al., and the one-volume anthology of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American poetry edited by David Shields.
Hollander, John, ed., American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume 2: Herman Melville to Stickney; American Indian Poetry; Folk-Songs and Spirituals (New York: Library of America, 1993).
Howarth, Peter, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Huggins, Nathan Irvin, Harlem Renaissance, updated edition, with a preface by Arnold Rampersad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Jarrell, Randall, Poetry and the Age (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1953).
Kalsone, David, Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (New York: Noonday, 1989).
Kalsone, David, Five Temperaments: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
Larson, Kerry, The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth Century American Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Longenbach, James, Modern Poetry After Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Longenbach, James, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
Marcus, Greil and Sollors, Werner, eds., A New Literary History of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Not limited to poetry, but with some two-dozen lively essays devoted to it.
Matthiessen, F. O., The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). A classic study, not devoted exclusively to poetry, but essential for understanding Whitman and Emerson.
Matthiessen, F. O., ed., The Oxford Book of American Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950). A landmark anthology, with a substantial introduction.
Mencken, H. L., “Puritanism as a Literary Force,” in Prejudices, first series (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1919). A blistering (and engaging) account of the legal and cultural difficulties against (and within) which modernists had to work. See also Potter, Obscene Modernism.
Myers, Jack and Wojahn, David, eds., A Profile of Twentieth Century American Poetry (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1991).
Nelson, Cary, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry & Politics of Cultural Memory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). A revisionist history; brings back into view the leftist poetry of the 1920s and 1930s, which the New Criticism had laid aside.
Nielsen, Aldon Lynn, Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Parini, Jay, ed., The Columbia History of American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). With essays on topics ranging from Anne Bradstreet to contemporary American poetry.
Pearce, Roy Harvey, The Continuity of American Poetry, 2nd ed. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1987).
Perkins, David, A History of Modern Poetry, Volume I: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).
Perloff, Marjorie, A History of Modern Poetry, Volume II: Modernism and After (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Perloff, Marjorie, Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Chicago: Northwest University Press, 1990).
Perloff, Marjorie, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
Pinsky, Robert, Poetry and the World (New York: Ecco Press, 1988).
Pinsky, Robert, The Situation of Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).
Poirier, Richard, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (New York: Random House, 1987). Notable for its pragmatist revision of histories of modernist poetry.
Poirier, Richard, Poetry & Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). A reassessment of literary modernism, placing American pragmatism at its heart (in discussions of Stevens, Frost, Stein, and others).
Porter, Joy and Roemer, Kenneth, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Potter, Rachel, Obscene Modernism: Literary Censorship & Experiment, 1900–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Not limited to America, but valuable as a contribution to our understanding of modernism, American literary expatriatism, and the publishing environment, such as it was, in which modern poets worked. See also Mencken, “Puritanism as a Literary Force.”
Pritchard, William, Lives of the Modern Poets (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). Reprinted by the University Press of New England in 1997. After more than thirty years, still a lively and indispensable introduction, with all but two chapters devoted to American writers.
Ramey, Lauri, Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).
Reynolds, David S., Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). A revisionary treatment of (among other writers) Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson.
Reynolds, David S., Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1995).
Roberts, Neil, A Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003). Though not limited to American writers, the book devotes considerable space to movements of which they were a major part (Imagism) or which they constituted (the New Negro Renaissance, the Black Mountain School, the Beats, Language Poetry); here also are readings of major works by Frost, Eliot, Stevens, Moore, Bishop, Plath, Pound, Lowell, and Ashbery.
Shields, David S., American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Library of America, 2007). The most comprehensive such anthology now in print, with biographical notes on the poets printed therein. See also the anthologies edited by John Hollander and by Robert Hass et al.
Shockley, Evie, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011).
Showalter, Elaine, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2009). A groundbreaking, comprehensive study.
Vendler, Helen, Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Vendler, Helen, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). A wide-ranging book, devoted chiefly to American poets from Whitman to Ashbery to Ammons to Sexton to Rich and beyond.
Vendler, Helen, Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
Von Hallberg, Robert, American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
White, Peter, and Meserole, Harrison T., eds., Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory and Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986).
Winters, Yvor, In Defense of Reason, with an introduction by Kenneth Fields (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987). Reprints three classics by one of the best, though most eccentric, Americans to have written about the nation’s poetry: Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry; Maule’s Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism (with three chapters devoted to poetry); The Anatomy of Nonsense (on Stevens, Eliot, and John Crowe Ransom); and a provocative (if infamous) essay, “The Significance of The Bridge by Hart Crane; or, What Are We to Think of Professor X?”
